Increasing numbers of southeast Asian men, particularly in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are marrying foreigners because fewer women in their homelands are willing to wed, a new study said yesterday.
The phenomenon, which dates back more than a decade, has even created a detectable trend in women’s migration, said the study by Daniele Belanger of the University of Western Ontario.
LOOKING ABROAD
“Since the beginning of the 1990s, more and more men in Southeast Asia are looking abroad to find a wife,” wrote Belanger in Population and Societies, the journal of France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies.
In Taiwan, 15 percent of wives were of foreign origin last year and 8 percent in South Korea.
In Japan, the phenomenon started earlier, in the 1980s, but has remained at a modest level: Only 5 or 6 percent of marriages in the mid-2000s involved foreign wives.
NEW TREND
But in all three places, foreign brides represented the largest group of new immigrants apart from the temporary workers, Belanger wrote. And the reason the men went looking abroad was the lack of women at home, she added.
With women’s education levels rising so was their representation in the workplace, she said.
SOCIETAL CHANGES
Increasing numbers of women were not willing to settle for the traditional role of a wife — at least as it exists in its current form. They preferred to keep their jobs and stay single.
For men, however, “they have the responsibility to continue the paternal line by giving birth to a son and, in many cases, looking after their aged parents,” Belanger wrote.
They could not therefore remain bachelors.
The foreign brides generally came from China and Vietnam, and if at first this kind of marriage was more common among the rural poor, it subsequently spread to the urban middle classes.
There were even marriage agencies specializing in this sector, charging the man’s family between 5,000 (US$6,500) and 10,000 euros.
Some observers have expressed fears that some of the brides involved are victims of trafficking.
However, “The great majority of migrant women marry of their own accord and not under parental pressure, and their objective is both to marry and to migrate,” Belanger wrote.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS